Court agrees with EFF: Utah's VPN law demands a technical impossibility

> platforms are left with an impossible choice: completely block all VPN traffic nationwide or withdraw access from Utah entirely

Is it even possible to reliably know that a connection is from a VPN? Anyone can proxy through a random hosting provider.

Remember to renew your support for the EFF. They take on some interesting cases

>As we’ve said time and time again: the internet will always route around censorship.

Is this still true, or has it become a truism? It seems nations like Iran and China (and events like Kashmir come to mind) have progressed the state-of-the-art and playbook to where we can't actually say it definitively will route around it.

Now seeing that the US and EU are flirting with these similar restrictions it's making me wonder how we'll be able to keep hold of these principles.

Maybe my concern with that adage is ultimately its passive voice, since it takes 'active' action by people to give us those options, and will probably take more actions by more people to keep it alive now.

The church of LDS is no stranger to technical impossibilities

"As we've said time and time again: the internet will always route around censorship."

It won't route around self-censorship that arises out of surveillance

Nor will it take a stand against SNI which is a dead simple means of implementing censorship that's in widespread use every day for years

Fascism is on the march. Dirty pictures aren't the real reason governments want this level of control over the internet. You can be sure that we'll see worse. Glad we won this battle.

> It even went so far as to prohibit websites from offering instructions on how to use a VPN to bypass these checks

How is that not a blatant first amendment violation?

Can someone explain why it wouldn't work to have porn companies use only certain domains, and filter based on those domains, if people are so intent on blocking it?

How is this impossible? DraftKings does it for California visitors.

Since when do lawmakers cared about technical impossibilities?

If you want to ban ISP's in your state, or build a state firewall, or arrest your citizens, you are welcome to do so - but what happens on servers outside your state that your state is choosing to connect to is clearly none of your business.

Seems like we need a fundamental challenge to the concept that you have any jurisdiction whatsoever.

[dead]

In 1897 Indiana almost passed a law defining Pi as 3.2. These jurists have never cared about reality.

Not sure what the impossibility is. VPN's have a set of exit relays. If traffic is coming from one of those exit relays, it's coming from a VPN, so adult websites can be required to block traffic from those exit relays. What am I missing?

I think "The Church" (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) is trying to keep Pornhub from publishing stats of how many ~people~ ~righteous Church members~ Melchizedek Priesthood holders are whacking to "cosplay porn" and "lesbian porn".